Past NIMBioS Postdoctoral Fellow

Xavier Thibert-Plante

Dates: April 2010 – 2012

As a NIMBioS postdoctoral fellow, Xavier Thibert-Plante (Ph.D., Biology, McGill University, 2010) studied how new species are formed. More precisely he studied the impact of ecological forces on evolutionary phenomena. One important aspect of formation of new species is the ability of the individuals to discriminate between conspecic and other species during reproduction. Therefore, he studied how species evolve the ability to discriminate among closely related species and which traits are more likely to be used as indicator (Thibert-Plante & Gavrilets, submitted). Thibert-Plante used the numerous computer clusters available to NIMBioS fellows to run his large scale numerical simulations. He also studied different aspects of ecological speciation, including the effect of facilitator (Liancourt et al. 2012), the effect of phenotypic plasticity (Thibert-Plante & Hendry 2011a), and the relative contribution of resource diversity, intraspecic competition and mate choice during sympatric speciation (Thibert-Plante & Hendry 2011b). Upon completing his fellowship at NIMBioS, Dr. Thibert-Plante accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University, Sweden.
In September 2013, Dr. Thibert-Plante joined the faculty in the Integrated Science Lab in the Department of Ecology and Environmental Science at Umeå University in Sweden.

Cristian Correa visited Thibert-Plante to collaborate on The pace of modern life: rates of phenotypic change in natural populations.

Education, Outreach and Training

Teaching/mentoring

Workshop: Introduction to MATLAB for REU 2012 (sole teacher and designer of workshop)

Co-mentor: Three Research Experience Undergraduate (REU) students (Rojin Chitrakar, Shreejaya Shrestha and Christa Wisniewski) for 2011 summer project on antifungal effects of essential oils on a biocontrol fungus. Rojin Chitrakar and Shreejaya Shrestha presented "The Effect of Borneol on the Germination and Growth of the fungus Beauveria bassiana" at the Third Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics, October 2011 at the University of Tennessee Conference Center.

Workshop: Introduction to MATLAB for REU 2011 (sole teacher and designer of workshop)

Training activities.
During each semester at NIMBioS, Thibert-Plante attended the Math Ecology Seminar, the Gavrilets lab meeting and the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Friday seminar.

NIMBioS is sponsored by the
National Science Foundation
through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.